Owners of the fire-scarred First Interstate Bank building said Thursday that it appeared the downtown Los Angeles skyscraper escaped serious structural damage but announced that it could take up to two months before bank employees and other tenants on the lower 21 floors are allowed to return. "An awful lot of the infrastructure has to be put back in place," said Harold J. Meyerman, president of First Interstate Bank Ltd., half-owners of the structure, after inspecting the 62-story high-rise.

The 24th annual "Best in the West" home-building and design competition was dominated once again by Southern California builders and architects who snared 19 grand awards, including two coveted "Home of the Year" prizes.

April 2, 2006 | Debra J. Miller, Debra J. Miller teaches English at a private high school in Los Angeles.

On Thursday, Oct. 8, 1964, the day the police decided my mother killed my father, I woke up late, the kind of late that snaps you out of your favorite dream, the one where you're wrapped in the arms of your favorite TV hunk--mine was Dr. Kildare--and he's just about to . . . when bang your unconscious tells you the sun is out, the lights are on all over the house and you're going to be late for school because nobody got you out of bed. We were a family of five. I was 14 and the oldest.

The fine fabrics that decorate France's most elegant homes, hotels and boutiques have been made popular around the world, largely through the marketing successes of Souleiado, a company that sells distinctive cottons, wools and silk challis in the United States under the Pierre Deux label.

Fess Parker, whose star-making portrayal of frontiersman Davy Crockett on television in the mid-1950s made him a hero to millions of young baby boomers and spurred a nationwide run on coonskin caps, died Thursday. He was 85. Parker, who played another pioneer American hero on television's "Daniel Boone" in the 1960s before becoming a successful Santa Barbara hotel developer and Santa Ynez Valley winery owner, died of complications from old age at his home near the winery, said family spokeswoman Sao Anash.

When art librarian Annette Masling was in Southern California recently, her must-see list included a light-industrial mall in the 900 block of Colorado Avenue in Santa Monica. She didn't go there to have her car repaired, despite the plethora of body shops in the area. Masling, who directs the library at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y.

SAY THIS MUCH FOR President Bush's pick for Interior secretary, Dirk Kempthorne: He's a better choice than Rep. Richard W. Pombo (R-Tracy) would have been. Back in the 1990s, when Kempthorne was a Republican senator representing Idaho, he sought only to weaken the Endangered Species Act, not eviscerate it, as Pombo has advocated. Kempthorne, now Idaho's governor, is unlikely to differ markedly from outgoing Secretary Gale Norton. And that's too bad.

Will Grimsley covered nine Summer Olympics and six Winter Games for The Associated Press, including the 1972 Munich Games in which 11 members of the Israeli team were killed in a terror attack. For a weary, slumbering newsman, the frantic knock on the steel door of room 4-B on the second floor of the Olympic press dormitory had the impact of a thunderclap. "The office said to get over to the Village right away," blurted a breathless messenger.